Steering The Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story

by Ursula K. Le Guin

A very young one said to me, “The old dead writers lived in the past, so they couldn’t write in the present, but we can.” Evidently the mere name, “present tense,” leads people to assume that it’s about now and that the past tense is about long ago. This is awfully naive.